Category: Editorial

The year has gotten off to an impressive start for blockchain startups, with a number of Series A and Series B rounds making headlines. Isreal-based Clear raised a $13m Series A led by Fidelity and venture arms of Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica. US lending platform BlockFi, which registered a 20x revenue growth in 2019, raised $30m in a Series B from global tech and blockchain VCs. These funding rounds indicate that the companies in question reached important milestones and have now entered a critical phase.

We are happy to share some big news today. chainDE is now chainEurope! The chainDE project started in November 2017 as a small listing service for all Blockchain startups in Germany and has become pretty popular amongst the Blockchain community and the VC crowd.

When many argue that Distributed Ledger Technology or Blockchain is still in its infancy and deprive the technology to play a significant role, they are mostly not referring to the state of the tech itself but the diffusion level and its rate of adoption. „Revolution“ is the notion that is often used for the stir that was caused by Bitcoin alone. Hence it does not take much of an imagination to realize what kind of a whirlwind Blockchain technology will become once more use cases find broad usage. But how does Blockchain technology get to play a significant role?

The strong price increase of bitcoin since the beginning of April has probably officially initiated the end of "crypto winter". While everyone has a story on what triggered the rally, the exact reasons seem to be less evident.

Blockchain is still years away from mass adoption. We are in the early days of a nascent technology, and there are still significant challenges to overcome (e.g. low scalability, high energy consumption, lousy user experience, price manipulation in cryptocurrencies).

About a year ago the website chain.de was launched to provide an overview of the German Blockchain and ICO landscape by listing blockchain startups, investors and consultancies. Much has happened in the Blockchain industry since then: The cryptocurrency market experienced its worst cryptowinter so far with bitcoin plummeting 82% from its all-time high on December 17, 2017 and Ethereum losing 92% to its all-time high on January 15, 2018. Overall, the total crypto market cap shed 83% over 12 months as the market corrected sharply, thus negatively affecting the profitability and continuation of mining operations, as well as key altcoin development projects.